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Guy Gardner: Warrior #34: Deathrock: Justice Is Coming

TGH: Welcome back to what is finally, FINALLY the last issue of this crossover (finally)! Last week, Wonder Woman, Hawkman and Probert broke Guy out of his creepy rape chamber, only to have Karine hit the alarm and fly away, leaving an apparently planet-wide army to kill everyone. Will they make it through in one piece? How will they manage to wrap up the story if they’re already setting up a giant battle against randos? Here’s a hint: sloppily!

QP: It’s so funny how they drew Wonder Woman on this cover so she looks like Lobo.

TGH: She hasn’t mattered at all in this story. Why would we showcase her instead of someone who hasn’t even been in this story at all?

QP: And I’m sure it was totally intentional that Probert looks like some kinda negaverse clone of Lobo. Except less hardcore.

DN: Probert is what happens when you pick Lobo in character selection and hit a different button.

BW: Lobo v Lobo: Dawn of Why Not?

DN: That would actually be a better use of Zach Snyder than what we’re getting.

BW: BertandErnie continues his journey across the color spectrum.

TGH: Why did Probert stop breathing and turn straight-up blue?

BW: Tertiary mutation.

QP: He probably knew Diana was gonna kick him in the balls for being on this cover when she wasn’t. Lobo doesn’t care, since his balls will just grow back.

TGH: I’m going to just assume she had something better to do.

QP: Inside, Beau Smith has apparently decided this entire thing was a space western all along. Western font and everything.

TGH: The story opens with a western monologue, the very first of it’s kind in the crossover, or anywhere, ever. They gave themselves western names too. Like you do when you decide you’re doing a thing this morning.

QP: “Western names,” aka every character in Tombstone.

DN: Wyatt Earp is rolling in his grave so hard he’s leaving the cemetery.

TGH: He knew one day he would be referenced in the 7th part of a shape-shifting gun man picture book for kids.

QP: THEY’RE NOT FOR KIDS ANYMORE, GOD. GOD, MOM.

BW: “How much are you boys paying me again?” One page in and I’m already missing Steve Leiber. Apparently in this issue, one of Guy’s opponents is a sentient pile of mashed potatoes.

QP: After the last issue of competent-if-grudging art, we’re back to scribbles. At least the colors are a little better so you can actually tell where one alien ends and the other begins.

TGH: Bronkk, who we haven’t seen in a while, and kind of looks like evil Batman, claims that he is going to murder Gardner, which makes sense if the entire planet is after him I guess. Instead of using the established bad guys, Bronkk is talking to like 5 more completely new bad guys. Glad we’re wrapping this thing up efficiently.

QP: We really, really, really didn’t need any more stupid aliens with stupid names. But at least Bronkk has a football play board set up to tell them what to do.

TGH: Karine shows up and they have a big debate about whether or not they should stab or fuck Guy to death.

QP: They could do both? It doesn’t really have to be one or the other.

DN: I mean, you’d have to do fuck first.

TGH: This is two whole pages of debate. This could’ve been brought up throughout the last 6 issues and we’d be up to speed instead of suddenly being asked to care about this.

QP: Guy is Karine’s answer for all three in Fuck Marry Kill. Well, maybe not the Marry bit.

BW: With the addition of liquefy. Or electrocute.

TGH: Meanwhile, the Tormock army is descending on our heroes. Frankly, it doesn’t look that big.

QP: In fairness, I’m not entirely sure where the team is supposed to be in that drawing.

TGH: Nobody does.

QP: Guy starts off by comparing himself to Custer, just in case you weren’t sure this was a western.

BW: The dialogue puts a cherry on top of our drift towards Western, amigo.

TGH: Beau Smith is really going for it as far as deciding today that this is how Guy talks and how the story is narrated.

QP: It’s such a weird swing in the character. He has never been remotely western in this book so far.

TGH: I think the stress of cranking out an event has finally gotten to him.

BW: “Event” will be my new euphemism from now on.

DN: For some reason, everyone goes along with Guy’s dumb fucking plan, which is just to charge the Tormock army full tilt.

TGH: Everyone turns to Guy and Hawkman for strategic advice. Wonder Woman is right there, but okay guys, let’s ask the sociopaths what we should do.

BW: Thank you!

QP: Wonder Woman and Hawkman, who are ostensibly trained and experienced in tactics and warfare, think this is a good idea. But it’s not just because Beau Smith said Guy is the best or anything. It’s because he really proved it by leading this entire mission that didn’t totally end with almost the entire team getting captured and the rest of them being cornered by an army.

BW: And the other half wandering off. Captain Atom is having none of this.

TGH: “We’ll probably all die, but I say we just rush in and start killing people instead of splitting the army up or taking the high ground or anything.”

BW: I realize that I’m dropping IQ points reading this crossover, but I’d like to think the characters weren’t.

TGH: I think Probert is being 100% sincere in saying that he thinks Guy is brilliant.

QP: “I like it” Wonder Woman says of his plan, totally sarcastically. “Yes, it will suffice,” says Hawkman, because he knows Guy will never come up with anything better. Guy and the creative team are too dense to pick up on it, though.

TGH: Hawkman was just going to hump his mace until they mercy-killed him, but this will suffice, I guess. His look says it all.

QP: He doesn’t have any charge left in his gun to kill himself with it.

BW: TURN OFF THE WI-FI HAWKMAN!

QP: Look, if he turns off the Wi-Fi he won’t be able to play Angry Birds, and you don’t want to get between Hawkman and his Angry Birds.

BW: On the other hand, if any of Guy’s bunch were scouting, we’d see that the Tormock Elite are busy killing off their own army.

TGH: Back at Bronkk’s house, all of the X-Men villains are preparing to fight.

DN: They’re trying to out-dark and out-edgy each other.

TGH: Did they forget about Flicker? Maybe he just realized how stupid this whole thing is.

QP: Flicker made jokes. He can’t be in this very serious grown-up story.

TGH: Nothing moves the Blob, I mean Slabb.

DN: Treach just really likes killing slaves.

TGH: It really gets the point across that he’s evil. That’s how you write.

QP: Nuance is for amateurs. Of course, there’s not a lot of room to write nuance on a character you just created who only exists so you can kill him in the span of 22 pages.

TGH: So suddenly, on the next page, Lobo fucking shows up! No, I didn’t skip a page. Lobo is here now. He wasn’t before.

QP: Deus ex Lobo. He blows up something…? And the team gets mad at him for doing it. I guess he blew up a good guy? I don’t know what the fuck happened in that panel.

BW: Perhaps they’re feeling my own frustration of “Oh God. Lobo.”

DN: He’s on a mission of mercy…NO MERCY! Hahahahaihateyousomuchbeausmith.

TGH: What in the actual hell, guys? What are you even doing in this issue? You’re supposed to be wrapping it up, not introducing people. You’ve got like 10 pages left!

QP: For whatever reason Hawkman thinks Lobo’s joined the Tormocks and I still don’t have a clue what happened.

TGH: I don’t believe it either, Guy, but making a comment about how stupid and random this is doesn’t excuse it from being stupid and random. Beau’s, I mean Lobo’s excuse for being there is that the Tormocks were destroying so many planets that Lobo was losing out on contracts! Wow, is this a new thing? Because the Tormocks have been around for a while, or so we’ve been led to believe. Also, Lupus has been stealing his bounties in addition to everything else he said to ramp up the drama.

QP: Lobo’s got a grudge against the Tormocks because they keep blowing up his bounties. Also killing the Leechuns and the Motarians (an heretofore unmentioned species of aliens which could be any number of unidentifiable groups that have graced these pages so far) is really fun. So he’ll help them.

BW: During Lobo’s “Will They or Won’t They” moment with Hawkman, Guy brings up his Vuldarian ancestry again. People might actually accept his new status quo if he’d just shut up about it.

QP: Guy challenges him to a Tormockicide competition, which really seals the deal.

TGH: It’s pretty much a really shitty version of that scene in Lord of the Rings.

QP: Shouldn’t they both just step aside and let Probert handle this? He’s the expert Tormock killer. Or so this very creative team decided three issues ago.

TGH: Between Lobo and Dollar Store knock-off Lobo, I’m surprised that the Tormocks are even still a thing.

TGH: The whole next page is a monologue about how Guy yet again transformed into a True Warrior.

QP: How many levels of True Warrior do you think there are? It’s convenient that he manages to level up every story arc.

TGH: I like that he grew himself huge and THEN makes Hawkman carry him. Thanks, dick. Is Wonder Woman telling the story now? Because Guy was a few pages ago, and some unknown person was telling it on the first page.

BW: On the upside, we’re not getting terrible dialogue swipes from Tombstone. SMALL BLESSINGS PEOPLE!

QP: It’s still kinda vaguely western-ish, though. Just sit back and imagine everything Guy says in a Rooster Cogburn voice.

TGH: That day, Guy transformed into the perfect, disciplined warrior. And then he opened his fucking mouth. TELL YOUR TORMOCK DADDY THAT JUSTICE IS COMING!

QP: I’m about tired of Vuldarian justice.

TGH: You just know that Beau Smith either a) spent a week coming up with the perfect line for that scene, or b) spent 5 seconds coming up with the perfect line for that scene. Either way, he declared it a complete victory.

DN: I’m about sure Mr. Smith was touching himself while writing this sequence.

QP: Probert, for being an expert Tormock hunter, sure does get incapacitated immediately.

TGH: He’s not an expert Fat Person hunter.

DN: Probert has the worst fate in this bit, where the Blob-like character decides that he needs to spend some time…IN THE SLABB JESUS FUCK NO.

BW: I feel like there was a missed opportunity about Slabb’s appearance. Something about gravy?

TGH: Wonder Woman just rips Treach’s claws off.

QP: I don’t think Beau Smith knows anything about Wonder Woman.

DN: Like, at all.

QP: “She’s a woman, she gives her friends manicures, right?” Maybe she thinks Treach’s nails are a bit much. “I told him to go with a nice, tasteful nude, or a dusky rose, but no, 8 inch steel claws.”

TGH: Bronkk apparently trained each of them on how to fight Guy’s team (a fact that could in no way have been learned from anything on the page), but forgot that maybe she can rip nails off if she wanted to.

QP: Treach wasn’t trained to fight Wonder Woman. He was majoring in Hawkman.

TGH: Those wings are not going to sell if you shoot right through them, Wep-Tex. Also, Wep-Tex’s training on Hawkman was pretty intensive. Weaknesses: Guns?

BW: To remind us that this is in fact, a Beau Smith joint, Lobo calls someone a crust-butt. “Mmm, mint in box, crust butt!”

TGH: Lupus was trained on Lobo I guess, because Bronkk helped write some of this month’s script and knew he would be here.

BW: Between the dialogue and the art, one of my eyes has quit working. This is not a joke.

TGH: Meanwhile, Karine and Bronkk are watching the fight from above. According to her, the battle is going well. Is it, Karine? Is it really? I mean, that one guy did eat Probert, so I’ll give you that.

DN: *Shudder*

TGH: She wants to use her evil death planet on them (which would kill them all, but whatever), but as we saw in JLA, they befriended the talking fetus, so that’s not an option.

QP: The labored Osmond Show joke is really pushing it.

TGH: That is just awful. They should be ashamed.

QP: I don’t think kids in the mid ’90s were hip to the Osmonds, guys.

TGH: Stick to your shitty cowboy references.

QP: I only know Marie Osmond as the lady that sold my grannie porcelain dolls on QVC. That’s why she’s famous, right?

BW: She was a little bit country. He was a little bit rock and roll.

QP: There were some country dolls.

TGH: Karine decides that fuck it, she’s not going to wait for her army to outnumber Guy and swoops down long enough to get clotheslined and have her ride stolen, so that was super helpful.

QP: “The, Vuldarian, the.”

BW: It took my third read through to realize that was supposed to be Lady Predator on the Space Harley.

TGH: Guy slams into Bronkk and tells him to eat wall, which is a customary saying in the Beau Smith school of shitty dialogue. Also Karine just warps up there with him somehow.

BW: Bronkk’s response is probably the only sane one. “Muwwaugh.”

DN: Apparently their foreplay back in Hawkman made Guy vulnerable to…punching?

TGH: Vague electrical fields can do anything.

QP: Look, you can’t really be the True Warrior if you haven’t shed your weakness to being punched once.

TGH: Wonder Woman appears and just straight-up punches Karine’s face off. Or Bronkk’s face? Wait, I think that’s still Treach? I have no idea where Wonder Woman is right now.

QP: It’s all just become a complete clusterfuck.

DN: Probert manages to fight his way out of the Slabb. Gross.

QP: He’s all burnt up from stomach acid.

BW: “No second helpings of THE BAD ONE!” Sure Bert, whatever dude.

TGH: Probert didn’t fight his way out so much as he is so completely disgusting to his very core that a man with eating powers couldn’t even stomach him.

QP: Ok, after some careful study of this awful, awful art, I think what happens is that on the next page, Guy is still fighting Karine and Bronkk, and then they fall off a ledge, and presumably their armor or masks or whatever are damaged in some way. This will be important in a page or so. Just remember that. Otherwise, this shit makes no sense.

TGH: Also I thought he was a robot or something since he mentioned his circuitry earlier in this very issue, but I’m overthinking this I’m sure. The point is that he’s out of the story. And that’s all that matters.

QP: He probably was a robot but then they wouldn’t have been able to make his death gory. So they conveniently “forgot” that part.

QP: Meanwhile, Lobo seems to be getting tangled up in those vine things from the JLA issue.

BW: Lobo also comments about us accepting no substitutes which I feel must have been directed at Probert.

QP: This entire page is a series of non sequiturs.

TGH: We’re running out of pages, so Lobo stops pretending he’s having a problem with the fight and kills Lupus so we can sprint to the end.

TGH: Guy gets a punishing knee horn to the leg, which isn’t that punishing, considering he can just turn it into a gun and back again and it’d probably be fine.

QP: Just fill the wound with flesh lead.

TGH: Then finally, in case you were still wondering why in the hell we had to read that issue of Justice League, the death planet appears, looking for revenge. Martian Manhunter really did a number on that fetus.

BW: And he begins quoting Danzig lyrics. I think.

TGH: Karine gets sucked into some tornado that the planet makes. She asks her brother for help, and he’s just like, “do you see the page count?”

QP: He’s the last Tormock now and he’s a-ok with that.

DN: Probs and Lobo make a super dumb Miller Lite joke.

BW: In the midst of Armageddon. I seriously could not hate both of them more.

TGH: Guy goes back to narration mode, full of the knowledge that the fetus planet is Karine’s kid. I guess he was carrying the script around. That kid turn out alright.

QP: The editor had quit by this point. He just initialed every page without even looking at them. Doctor’s orders.

TGH: “Wait, you’re having HOW much shit get introduced in this final issue?”

QP: If you go up to Eddie Berganza these days and say “Warrior” he has a Nam flashback.

TGH: Beau decides that Bronkk can now put people into grey spheres. Fuck it. Circles are powers now. He apparently accidentally made a cocoon, because Guy breaks out as a fully-grown Cardone.

QP: Ahhh, so that’s how he becomes the True Warrior: by becoming someone else entirely!

TGH: So I guess the only reason Guy Gardner was born was so his grandpa could take his body over at the last minute to destroy the Tormocks. He’s just a host for this parasite. Guy didn’t do anything! Best comic book character ever!

QP: Guy doesn’t ever do anything though, so this is par for the course.

TGH: He punches Bronkk in the face once and that’s it. It doesn’t even look that bad except there are a lot of letters in that sound effect so I guess it was.

QP: That is the exact sound a nose makes when it shatters into an alien’s frontal lobe.

BW: War is over! Peace forever!

TGH: “Done.” -Cardone, Beau Smith, Eddie Berganza, the readers

TGH: Cardone has the fucking GALL to call Guy a warrior with no equal.

QP: Cardone, you literally just finished his fight for him.

TGH: “Congrats on making it to this planet so I could do the rest. Truly you are our greatest hero.”

BW: Even Probert did more than Guy. And I say this hating that guy.

QP: Probert at least blew a dude up from the inside. All you did was get damseled.

BW: Quartiary mutation – indigestion.

TGH: Everything he was taught led up to this. And now it’s over, and he didn’t even participate. What a real storybook ending.

TGH: Guy’s final monologue sure does abuse the word “we.” My mind is still reeling from the whirlwind that was the last few pages. I need a drink.

QP: He’s talking about bonds that will never be broken between him and these other warriors, so I fully expect that he’ll be back to sniping at the JLA next issue.

TGH: I’m pretty sure he never teams up with any of them ever again. Cardone probably does though.

BW: And we’ve now finished up as a terrible war movie.

DN: Guy’s “staring off dramatically” face just looks like he beefed and hopes Hawkman doesn’t notice.

TGH: Welp, that’s it for this damn crossover. It managed to do two things: 1) complete the entire storyline regarding Guy’s heritage and purpose while still somehow continuing the series, and 2) wrapping it up without his actual help, rendering his entire purpose meaningless. What in the hell can even happen next? I guess we’ll find out next week!

TGH: There is nothing that could end this crossover better than Beau Smith pretending to be Guy Gardner complaining about how Wizard magazine thinks he’s the worst character ever. It’s the perfect cap to this whole thing.

TGH: Wizard voted him as one of the top 10 characters they want to see dead. Haha, ouch!

QP: I’d like to think one day, he’ll find our website, and write a letter column to himself about how much he hates us. Or maybe just light a flaming bag of dog shit on our doorstep.

TGH: “Sticks and stones, and we’ll see who outlives who.” Poor Beau. There are only four letters this time, and Beau brings Wizard up every time. No wonder he’s taking a break next month. I’m pretty sure this broke him.

QP: Seriously, it’s even mentioned multiple times in some replies.

BW: Of the four, the third one by NOA is our obligatory “added to a watch list” of the month.

TGH: “Wizard clearly doesn’t read this comic!” No, they do.

’90s Ad Showcase:

BW: Hey look! Greg Land didn’t JUST trace porn at one point!

QP: Maybe he started tracing porn so that he could get better at feet, and it just spiraled from there.

TGH: This month, Nightwing saves a man while battling a giant Batman.

BW: Saves a man or is Santa giving everyone severed heads this year?

QP: Giant Batman is looking on disapprovingly.

BW: So disappointed.

QP: “I taught you better than carrying sacks full of heads, Dick.”

TGH: Unfortunately the moon behind Nightwing is illuminating his chest but not his face.

QP: That’s just how magnificent his pecs are. They glow. And his abs. And the rest of him. His face is just ok.

BW: Richard Grayson’s nickname isn’t “Face” after all.

QP: Face Grayson doesn’t have the same ring to it.

Next Time:

QP: Next Time: Guy faces off against his greatest threat yet: The Wizard. The Wizard definitely wants to kill Guy, and Guy definitely will not shut up about how stupid he is for it.

TGH: Guy refuses to fight The Wizard, but he does take a month off to have a good cry.